Android News

Google announced today via their Official Google Mobile Blog that they have created a new API that allows 3rd party app developers the ability to tap into a users location. Google says that apps are becoming more about “location, location, location” and they feel that since they have a tool in place, they may as well share it with other developers so they can create quality location-based application. You can check out the documentation here.

With Google opening up this type of functionality for web apps, the integration between Android and a web service could prove to be extremely valuable. Google gives some very interesting use cases for services that could be created:

Thermostats that turn on and off automatically when you’re driving towards or away from home.

Traffic that send alerts if there’s heavy traffic ahead of you or on a route you usually take based on your location history

Your credit card accounts to alert you of potential fraud when a purchase is made far from where you actually are.

Photo albums so your vacation photos appear on a map at all the places you visited based on your location history.

Of course these are just some of the many uses that all those intelligent developers out there will start working on. What kind of functionality can you dream of that uses the a web service / Android phone location combo?

We're really excited at Appiction to start using this. We're getting more and more people wanting these sort of apps and the complexity has been somewhat cost prohibitive for some clients. We can't wait to dig into the API.